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Nasim Annabi, Ph.D., assistant professor of chemical engineering at Northeastern University, has been busy developing a new type of surgical glue that could completely replace the need for staples and sutures.

Annabi has been leading the research on the highly elastic tissue adhesives, which she and her colleagues at the University of Sydney and Harvard Medical School described in a paper published in October this year in Science Translational Medicine, stm.sciencemag.org/content/9/410/eaai7466.full.

The gel-like glue, called MeTro, is made from a human protein that has been modified to react to ultraviolet light. It’s designed to be applied directly to a wound, and after it’s placed under UV light for a few seconds, researchers say, the wound is sealed.

“We observed that this isn’t just a sealant; it actually helps with tissue regeneration,” she notes in an article on Northeastern University’s website, news.northeastern.edu/2017/10/researchers-develop-surgical-glue-that-seals-wounds-in-seconds.

According to Annabi and her research team, it’s highly adhesive and elastic so it can be used as a patch lungs, hearts or other organs, and it can also be adjusted to degrade at a pace specific to the amount of time an organ needs to heal.

Following the initial research and development and the paper written about it, Annabi and her colleagues now plan to test MeTro over a longer period of time.